Stupidity and Cyber Security

The Norwegian incumbent telecom Telenor filed a criminal police case last year for unlawful computer intrusion, and a Norwegian security analyst uncovered a previously unknown and sophisticated infrastructure for targeted attacks - and Phishing attacks are the most common method. Telenor and other large enterprises spends a silly amount of millions to repair the damages after these cyber attacks - and none of us should be surprised as all of us are almost daily receiving various phishing attacks that are getting more and more sophisticated.

The problem is however possible to avoid by more sophisticated analysis of the content of your incoming email's. One simple method is of course to investigate the attachments thoroughly (we are already doing that) and specifically the URL's, but we all know that at the end of day it is really very hard to avoid stupidity - that is executives that double clicks on "anything"and consequently they are exposing not only themselves, but all of their executive peers by clicking on one of these URL's without caution (apparently because they believe they have a fool proof early detection system) and all it does is opening a back door to your system. Its happening every day, thus the enterprises need to make major investments into sophisticated solutions that can cover up for the executives stupidity - whilst the rest of us just have to apply a small portion of intelligence and consideration before we dump the phishing email in the waste box. One thing is that we who receives these phishing attempts can possibly try to apply a bit of common sense, but we should also educate all those that are sending us serious and proper emails to avoid sending links, in most cases it is more than enough to just instruct us to login on to a specific site (your named bank etc) without providing the link.



References:
Telenor cyber attack